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Summary: Association of American University Presses Book Jacket Award, 1996 "Beginning with a description of a poster for a punk band and ending with a critique of the movie JFK, this work marshals an impressive array of cultural information in attempting to provide an overall history of the genre. Simon closely examines images and films, relating them to the continuing struggle over the authoring and interpretation of the story of Kennedy's death." --Library JournalThe assassination of John F. Kennedy provoked intense public debates and focused the world's attention on the recorded details of the event in still and moving images. Intense scrutiny of the testimony and images became a national obsession. Dangerous Knowledge argues that the very currents that powered the debates also prompted a crisis in interpretation that profoundly affected American culture.From 1963 to the present day, amateur sleuths have proposed compelling theories of who was responsible for Kennedy's death and why. In the process they entered into an ongoing struggle centered in questions of authority: Who has access to evidence and the power to interpret history? What is the relation of photographs and films to the writing of history? To show how this struggle literally changed history and figured in the avant-garde's artistic production, Art Simon considers a wide range of cultural work shaped by the assassination.Simon reveals the influence of the assassination theorists on commercial films such as JFK and Parallax View and shows how the images that blanketed the media resurfaced in Andy Warhol's silk screens, work and underground film of Bruce Conner, and other 1960s artists where they become vehicles for challenging the truth value of photographs or the public's endless fascination with celebrities."This history of the representation of the JFK assassination makes a terrific contribution to film studies and indeed to cultural studies generally. Moving with wit and erudition across political history, avant-garde film, serigraphy, journalism, and mass-market film, Simon transcends the banalities of the high culture/low culture binary to produce a study of exemplary range and insight."--David E. James, School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California

Association of American University Presses Book Jacket Award, 1996 "Beginning with a description of a poster for a punk band and ending with a critique of the movie JFK, this work marshals an impressive array of cultural information in attempting to provide an overall history of the genre. Simon closely examines images and films, relating them to the continuing struggle over the authoring and interpretation of the story of Kennedy's death." --Library JournalThe assassination of John F. Kennedy provoked intense public debates and focused the world's attention on the recorded details of the event in still and moving images. Intense scrutiny of the testimony and images became a national obsession. Dangerous Knowledge argues that the very currents that powered the debates also prompted a crisis in interpretation that profoundly affected American culture.From 1963 to the present day, amateur sleuths have proposed compelling theories of who was responsible for Kennedy's death and why. In the process they entered into an ongoing struggle centered in questions of authority: Who has access to evidence and the power to interpret history? What is the relation of photographs and films to the writing of history? To show how this struggle literally changed history and figured in the avant-garde's artistic production, Art Simon considers a wide range of cultural work shaped by the assassination.Simon reveals the influence of the assassination theorists on commercial films such as JFK and Parallax View and shows how the images that blanketed the media resurfaced in Andy Warhol's silk screens, work and underground film of Bruce Conner, and other 1960s artists where they become vehicles for challenging the truth value of photographs or the public's endless fascination with celebrities."This history of the representation of the JFK assassination makes a terrific contribution to film studies and indeed to cultural studies generally. Moving with wit and erudition across political history, avant-garde film, serigraphy, journalism, and mass-market film, Simon transcends the banalities of the high culture/low culture binary to produce a study of exemplary range and insight."--David E. James, School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California

Description based upon print version of record.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Beginning with a description of a poster for a punk band and ending with a critique of the movie JFK (the exemplary "Hollywood narrative discourse"), this work marshals an impressive array of cultural information in attempting to provide an overall history of the genre. Simon (Montclair State Univ.) closely examines images and films, relating them to the continuing struggle over the authoring and interpretation of the story of Kennedy's death. Sections are devoted to the journalistic evidence, including the Zapruder film; the works of avant-garde artists Andy Warhol, Bruce Connor, the Ant Farm, and what Simon calls the "Pop Camp"; and, finally, a group of Hollywood films. The author handles the films with flair, providing a chapter on the underappreciated Connor's Report, which we learn in the epilog actually inspired the entire effort. Simon's stated aim of providing a context-a history-is not clearly fulfilled, but this critical examination will no doubt interest all who continue to be fascinated by this controversy.-Jane E. Sloan, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

This study gives the initial impression of an exploration. Simon (Montclair State Univ.) indicates that he will examine the numerous images connected with the JFK assassination from three separate but interacting sites: images that informed the government's investigations and the reportage of the media (e.g., the Zapruder film); American avant-garde films and sixties pop art (e.g., Warhol's silkscreens); and commercial films that shaped--and were shaped by--the cyclical assassination debates (Executive Action, JFK, and others). The author promises both a chronological discourse and a comparison of the images by their production modes and their formal characteristics. This study will appeal to assassination buffs and others with considerable formal background in aesthetics, depth psychology and structuralist criticism of society, culture, art, and especially film/video, but this limited audience will find some serious flaws in this work. The editing is quite uneven, surprising in the distinguished "Culture and the Moving Image" series. There are misspellings and ambiguous grammatical constructions, and labored vocabulary favors the abstruse. Often the reader is confronted by terms that demand knowledge of a particular figure/theory of film criticism, but the author provides no endnotes to help the beginning or intermediate reader. Classic texts are assumed to be in the purview of the reader, and there are references to items that the reader has not seen or viewed. Olsen provides seven plates that deal with works discussed, but fails to give further visual references, a keenly felt absence in a study that makes much of the interpretation of images. Olsen's attempts to chart the interaction of art and politics, to study a line of inquiry across decades, to evaluate the "image as truth" issue to compare and contrast the same issue treated in different forms and styles, and to provoke a response to both the outrageous and overly simplistic attitudes toward the JFK assassination are all worthwhile scholarly endeavors. This reviewer wishes the undertaking had been done more thoroughly, carefully, and clearly so a wider audience could have participated. R. E. Sutton emeritus, American University